A terminal still offers a more composable interface than a GUI. Analog feedback is still a concern for high level pilots. You are confusing power tools with entry-level instruments.
I won't debate this. I'm a fan of the enduring pipe operator and the simple elegance of process composition in *nix. My point was more: what will we need them for? To review code written by a bot? GUI tools are better for this IMHO, or at least, terminals aren't any better than GUI tools, possibly worse. To read the plan output of Claude code, why would I want raw markdown in a terminal when I can read the formatted output as intended in a different tool?
To be clear, I'm not suggesting "the future is IDEs/GUI/etc" but that it's some potentially new refinement over TUIs and GUIs where the focus is no longer on editing, tinkering, debugging, but perhaps new tools that make it easier and efficient to work with agent swarms and give them instruction/prompts.
Piping is a feature of the shell, not the terminal.
But composable means that cli tools produces text, consume text, and are configured through text. You can build independent tools to do separate task and then build a meta tools that coordinate them. While the individual tools may be complex, the coordination can be very easy. With posix shells, you have piping and subshells that do a lot of the heavy lifting.
Piping is implemented in the shell (bash, zsh, etc...), not the unix commands themselves nor the terminal emulator. Whether the above discussion was using the word "terminal" to refer to the terminal emulator, the shell, or the whole combined experience is anyone's guess.
